One Day At A Time.

After many months of testing and submitting bugs to Directadmin, there is finally an error and slick installation to Directadmin on FreeBSD 11. Previously a number of fixes had to be made in order to make certain aspects function i.e. Dovecot and PHP.

The latest “officially” released version of FreeBSD with Directadmin is 9.x both 32/64bit, however as times changes, things quickly become depreciated and not great running an out of date OS in this modern day. In fact it is frowned upon!

In the next few weeks I will be migrating my 9.3 install over to 11, due to the jump and the number of changes I have opted for a fresh installation.

New years eve I spent a significant amount of time, trying to battle Java and the Dell KVM software, happy new year?

I tried multiple servers, different OS’s, different configurations, different browsers but no further, much swearing little I resolved it early hours this morning. The Error I saw every time was “Network connect error” for both viewing a SIP and utilizing the virtual media option.

Clearly this is due to Dell no longer supporting the older KVM/IP units which means new versions of Java with different cipher and levels of encryption attempts do not work as you expect.

I even tried older versions of Java 64 and 32 bit, along with 64 and 32 bit versions of Java and failed.

Steps to resolve

1) Install a version of java (ideally the latest version to avoid any flaws and holes from a security prospective.)

2) Open the Java settings from control panel

3) Ensure under the security tab “Enable Java Content in the browser” is ticked

4) Under the security tab, ensure you add the server IP or Hostname whichever you are using to access it is added as an exception (including HTTP or HTTPS whichever you are using)

5) Open the following in notepad assuming you are using windows - Program Files (x86) / Java / jre1.X.X.X / lib / security / java.security
Remove the following line:

key jdk.tls.disabledAlgorithms

Add the following line:

jdk.tls.disabledAlgorithms=SSLv3, EC, ECDHE, ECDH

Close the file and save – then close all browsers

6) Open a browser, ensure Java is enabled as an add on and this extremely annoying issue should be resolved.

My bad, I left it around 8 months before noticing my CSGO Server and my TF2 server were not being used. I have not played games so to speak for probably around 2 years now. I run these servers for fun, and allow others to have somewhere to play.

I noticed the reason these servers were offline was actually due to the fact they were servely outdated and were rejecting any client connections. Also for ‘public’ servers it appears a “token” is now required. Both my CS:GO and TF2 servers are now updated and once again fully functional – I have reset the statistics for HLstats.

At home I now run ONE machine 24/7 which is a mac mini, makes a change from a multitude of quad xeons racking up the electricity bill, I must admit watching the meter go round and round is quite daunting. I must get to sell all my surplus hardware at some point before it becomes worthless.

I seem to be at a random stage in life, where I am de-cluttering, deleting old files I no longer/will never ever use and refreshing things, I think I need this for my own sanity more than anything? after all a minimal uncluttered life is a happy one apparently. Simple is the way forward, minimal wires/stress free setups. Apply this logic to the entire household and everything is good!

I really need to review my server hardware as I have lots and need to virtualise the remainder of my servers to put my green stamp on it.

I have concerns in regards to FreeBSD starting to become a “user friendly” OS, my first gripe was when FreeBSD 10-RELEASE was announced/released which meant “pkg” became the global command instead of pkg_*

Although I understand it is trying to make things easier, it makes me feel dirty, it makes me feel as if it is heading towards the user friendlyness of a typical “Linux” OS, with a full blown easy to use package manager which results in people using more precompiled binaries and not utilizing ports.

Using precompiled binaries means people are going to become more lazy by the day and run applications with more flaws in and features they are not going to use, the end issue being poorly optimised applications.

So, you compile a port that is going to take *all* night or even longer and the dreaded “options” keeps appearing after every prerequisite towards a port.

Before compiling the port if you type “make showconfig-recursive” it will present all the options before you compile, so now after you have decided the variables during compiling, you can leave it going without worrying you need to keep going back and pressing return.

It really appears to save substantial amounts of time, I just wish the command was a little more advertised, who knows… maybe there is a lack of people who realize this exists or are like me and guilty of not reading man pages.